Rainer Maria Rilke; Or, an Open Life

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in 1875 in Prague and passed away in 1926 in Montreux, Switzerland, making 2025 the 150th anniversary of this remarkable author’s birth, and 2026 the 100th anniversary of his death. This biography draws on previously unseen materials to paint a portrait of Rilke as we have never seen him before.

To be open and to write, that’s all Rilke ever wanted. A wish at once modest and ambitious. As an author, he experienced »all of life […] as if it went straight through him with all its force.« But also with all its contradictions: Rilke fled from his muses but couldn’t live without them, he lamented the effects of human progress but was enthusiastic about technology, he loved the simple life yet had a strong preference for beautiful objects and locations. He produced one of the first modern novels in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and published collections of poems that defined an entire epoch, and whose expressive force remains alive to this day.

Sandra Richter, a literary scholar and the director of the German Literature Archive, has worked with previously unknown sources that were made accessible when the Archive acquired Rilke's literary remains in 2022. In her new biography, Rilke is shown in a new light: not as the reclusive hermit that he liked to portray himself as, but robust, assertive, an active and engaging conversationalist, cheerful and self-deprecating, and more financially savvy than most would assume. This biography makes it clear why it’s more worthwhile than ever to read Rilke now: he lived in difficult times, and he processed them with a ruthlessness that perhaps can only seem convincing in the face of existential threats.